Seeing the real faces of the fest

Participants travel to Immokalee to visit the charities, meet children who benefit from event

For vintner Dick Grace, the best part of the Naples Winter Wine Festival isn't pouring his wines for an elite crowd of wine aficionados.

It isn't meeting TV chef Emeril Lagasse, who is here to cook for the charity event, and it isn't having the chance to bid on extraordinary wine and travel packages at the auction today.

For Grace, the best part is driving to the impoverished town of Immokalee, a dramatic contrast from Naples, a wealthy coastal town where the norm is gated communities and palatial beachfront estates that reach into the tens of millions of dollars.

On Friday morning Grace traveled with 130 other festival attendees to see where the money from the event has made a difference, and where more help is needed.

The wine festival has raised $26.5 million in the past five years for children's charities in Collier County, including eight organizations in Immokalee.

The migrant farming town has 25,000 residents and four traffic lights. The population doubles from October to May, when the growing season is busiest.

At PACE Center for Girls, a school to keep at-risk girls out of trouble and to help them set goals, the group was greeted with banners and cookies and treated to a performance by the "PACE Pipers."

In red T-shirts and camouflage pants, seven girls danced and sang out a Cheetah Girls number.

We are sisters

We stand together

Someone's always there behind us

to catch us when we fall

The guests heard stories about how the PACE Center has changed lives. With a success rate of 92 percent — that is, the number of students who have remained free from committing any new crime — there are many.

Tenth-grader Logan Allen stole $800 and was on felony probation 11 years ago. At PACE, she's made friends, is on the honor roll and has been invited to attend a student leadership conference in Washington, D.C.

Mary Trevino, also in 10th grade, had 21 fights on record when she arrived at PACE when she was 12 years old. She said she'd probably be in jail if it weren't for PACE.

The nonprofit organization hopes to double its success stories with its new building, some 21,250 square feet that will triple its capacity and allow it to double the number of students it serves, which currently is 40.

PACE has raised nearly half of the money for its $6.2 million capital campaign. Proceeds from the wine festival have contributed to the project, and this year they have applied for more, according to Threasa Miller, executive director of PACE.

Bill Bain, one of the festival's founders, said he was moved by the performance.

"You could see how happy they all were to be there," he said. "You could see the joy they had in being part of something like this."

Donna Hall, a Naples resident who has attended the festival for several years, said it's difficult for people to understand the true poverty of Immokalee until they can see it in person.

"This is what it's really all about: seeing the charities," she said. "It tells the story of so many organizations."